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Hermione raised an eyebrow and nodded.
"Episkey!"
White light washed over Proxima Midnight. Her wounds sealed at a speed visible to the naked eye, closing over completely in the span of a breath.
The invisible force binding her vanished with it. Proxima Midnight dropped to the ground. She touched her own skin instinctively, found it unmarked and whole, then looked up at Hermione, eyes full of the raw terror that follows a near-death moment, and something deeper beneath it. Wariness. The genuine kind.
In that instant, she and Corvus Glaive beside her finally understood. Ebony Maw's earlier caution, his humility, it wasn't cowardice. It was a clear-eyed read of the power standing in front of them.
Their own taunting and bluster, by comparison, must have looked exactly like what it was.
A clown's performance.
It turned out the ones who hadn't been thinking clearly were never Ebony Maw. It was them.
Thanos regarded Hermione. His expression remained calm, but something had shifted in his eyes. A new weight settled there. "You said earlier — if I want the Infinity Stones, I need to show sincerity?"
Hermione folded her arms. "Of course. There's no such thing as a free lunch. To get something, you give something. That's how it works."
"Then what are your terms?" Thanos asked. He had caught the opening in her words. "The way you're putting it — the Stones aren't completely off the table. You just want an exchange."
"Clever." Hermione snapped her fingers. "The Stones — sure, I can give some of them to you. But." She raised one finger. "The Power Stone, the Time Stone, the Mind Stone, and the Reality Stone are off-limits. For now. I still have use for them."
"In exchange, I'll give you the Space Stone. And in return, you retrieve the Soul Stone for me."
Thanos's brow moved, barely, almost nothing, but it moved.
The Power Stone and the Reality Stone were already in her hands. He'd seen that himself.
The Mind Stone she'd sent Loki to swindle from him. He knew that too.
But the Space Stone and the Time Stone...
"What you're saying is..." His voice carried a careful, searching note.
Hermione didn't answer. Instead, she reached into her pocket and produced a pendant.
She cradled it in her palm. Ran her thumb lightly across the surface.
The next instant, light rippled across the pendant in slow, liquid waves, and four gems came into view, each glowing with its own distinct aura, set into the pendant's face.
Blue. Green. Red. Yellow.
Space. Time. Reality. Mind.
Four Infinity Stones, resting quietly in Hermione's hand, pulsing with a presence that pressed against the chest like a physical weight.
A sharp, collective intake of breath cut through the air.
Ebony Maw's pupils snapped tight. His body trembled, and he couldn't stop it.
Corvus Glaive and Proxima Midnight stood with their mouths open, unable to produce a single word.
Even Yondu and the Ravagers, who had been watching the whole scene with detached amusement, were struck silent. Jaws open. Eyes wide. Not closing for a very long time.
And Thanos. The cosmic overlord who had outlasted empires, who had seen things that would shatter lesser minds, his composure finally broke.
He stared at the pendant in her hand. When he spoke, his voice carried a tremor he couldn't quite suppress. "You actually have four Infinity Stones. No, counting the Power Stone you just acquired..."
Five.
A full five Infinity Stones.
Thanos felt his understanding of reality take a blow it had never taken before.
How many years had he spent scheming toward this? How much had he sacrificed, planned, endured?
And the result? He'd barely gotten his hands on one Mind Stone, just one, only to have Hermione lift it from him without breaking a sweat.
While she, apparently, had spent that same time collecting five.
Five Stones. One short of all six. One short of the legendary set said to be capable of rewriting the universe itself.
What was she planning to do with them?
A wave of deep disorientation rolled through him. For the first time in decades, he found himself questioning everything, all of it, every calculation, every year of patience and careful maneuvering. Had all of it been a joke?
But after the shock passed, one thought in his mind grew harder and more certain than it had ever been.
Cooperating with Hermione was the right call.
This Witch possessed not only power beyond imagining but a kind of "luck," or perhaps something more like method, that he couldn't begin to match. If he could bring her to his side, the odds of his grand design for balance succeeding would shift dramatically in his favor.
Hermione seemed quite pleased with his reaction. She turned the pendant over idly in her fingers, her tone easy. "Don't look so tense, Lord Thanos. Ruling the universe doesn't interest me. I collect these things out of curiosity."
She weighed the pendant in her hand.
"As an alchemist, they're extraordinary research material. The energy systems, the underlying rules, genuinely fascinating. Take this blue one. The Space Stone." She tilted the pendant slightly. "I've studied it thoroughly enough at this point. Its mechanics hold no more secrets for me."
Then, as casually as if she were tossing out a piece of trash, she pried the Space Stone free from the pendant and flicked it with her finger.
The blue gem traced a clean arc through the air and came to rest, hovering, directly in front of Thanos.
"There. Call it a down payment," Hermione said, unbothered. "As for the rest, once I've finished studying them, I won't have much use for them either."
"..."
Thanos stared at the Stone hanging before him, radiating its quiet blue light. For a moment, he couldn't move.
Just like that?
The Stone he had dreamed of for years, plotted for across decades, she'd just tossed it to him as a down payment?
He reached out. Closed his hand around it. Slowly.
Something indescribable rose in his chest. There was joy, the specific, electric joy of finally holding what you've spent years wanting. But underneath it ran something stranger. A sense of absurdity. And, strangely, relief.
Because the truth was, the moment he'd understood that Hermione was holding five Infinity Stones, his scalp had gone cold. For one instant, he had genuinely considered throwing everything at her right then, consequences be damned.
The most terrifying part wasn't that she had five Stones. It was that he had no idea what she planned to do with them.
Thanos knew exactly what he intended. His purpose was something he believed in, something he could call, however coldly, noble. Erase half of all life. Give the other half a universe worth living in. A necessary evil, and one he could accept.
But Hermione?
A woman who played by no logic he could read. Power that had no visible ceiling. An attitude toward everything around her that looked, from the outside, like someone who found it all mildly amusing. If she assembled all six Stones and then simply decided, on a whim, that the universe was getting dull,
A snap of her fingers.
He didn't want to finish that thought.
As it turned out, though, perhaps he had worried for nothing.
Looking at her now, that completely unbothered air, that "toss it aside when I'm bored with it" relationship she had with objects of theoretically infinite power, she genuinely didn't seem to want to use them for anything. Collecting them probably was, just as she'd said, nothing more than satisfying a researcher's curiosity.
Thanos let out a slow breath.
He thought he understood now.
Scientists who threw themselves entirely into their work, chasing a principle, verifying a hypothesis, often did things that looked incomprehensible from the outside. Obsessive things. Fanatical things.
The magical equivalent was apparently no different. In their eyes, Infinity Stones were probably just that: unusually rare, unusually interesting experimental material.
➤ Next: The Scapegoat
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